I'm writing this post in the middle of a 75°F day,
but last week it was definitely fall weather. Fall means apples, and
apples mean applejack, so I grabbed a few recipes from the PDT book.
My favorite of the night was a variant on the Applejack Rabbit, which
is a drink that combines apple brandy, citrus, and maple syrup.

Any research project is going to involve a literature search: reading
through a bunch of papers that might be relevant to your topic in
order to get a sense of what the field already knows. Now, maybe
there's some magic technique for picking out the information that
matters, passing over the rest, and writing out a single, coherent
story in one pass through all the papers you can find. If that
technique exists, I have no idea what it is.

So when every paper brings up ten new questions and twenty papers to
start answering them, I need a system to keep my notes organized. I
need notes that let me jump back and forth between papers without
losing my place, draw links between papers, and store lists of
citations to come back to. Here's how I do it.

Brain science fact from my thesis research: the EEG signal doesn't
actually come from your neurons firing! Because of the way action
potentials are structured, their effects on the electric field cancel
themselves out by the time they make it outside of your head. The EEG
actually comes from your dendrites, which are the tree-like parts of
the neuron that collect signals from other neurons. But even then,
only some neurons have the right shape for their dendrites to
contribute to the EEG.